


dust and devils on my conscience

by dawnstruck



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003), Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentions of alcoholism, Minor Character Death, Non-Linear Narrative, Pacific Rim AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 08:40:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9313952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawnstruck/pseuds/dawnstruck
Summary: Mankind, like cockroaches, are tenacious little beasts.





	

**Author's Note:**

> After the bus ride from hell yesterday during which, for some reason, the driver thought it would be a good idea to play Pacific Rim, even though it was way past midnight and the movie has too many fucking explosions, I decided to make the most of it by spitefully ficcing in my head. So this is what happened. I apologize for the mess.
> 
> Title is taken from "Chasing Twisters" by Delta Rae.

 i.

A kaiju is a fearsome thing. Vast and vicious and near-on invincible.

But mankind, like cockroaches, are tenacious little beasts.

They thrive, they survive. Even if many of them die. Even if Death, for some, is a promise.

 

xviii.

The first tentative step a Jaeger takes is always the most exhilarating. Like a roller-coaster ride, only that you are the loop, the sky, and gravity all at once.

Roy used to love this. He thinks he might be able to love it again.

The water crashes around them and then they move forward.

 

v.

Two truths. Roy wasn't in love with Maes and Maes wasn't in love with Roy.

That doesn't mean it hurts any less.

 

xiv.

“Revenge?!” Edward snaps. His metal fist beats against the metal wall to his right, just once, but it seems to set the entire room and everything in it ringing. “You honestly think this is about revenge for me?!”

The gleam in his eyes is furious. Roy does not flinch. He has faced down monsters. A mere boy does not intimidate him.

“Al and I have saved _millions_ of lives,” Ed continues, “We've gone out there again and again, just like you and Hughes have, and you dare belittle me by simply calling it revenge?!”

It would be easy to make a quip about Edward's height then, but his rage is a curious thing. It makes him appear larger than he is and yet there is still so much of a child in him.

“If anything,” Ed adds and his voice is merely a whisper now, like the aftershocks of an earthquake, “You should get some revenge yourself.”

 

vi.

It's a strange feeling, to mesh your mind with someone so intricately and then have it ripped away within what is little more than an exhale. It hurts and then it heals and then there is still that frayed edge, forever there at the seams of your conscience.

Roy resists the urge to pluck at the loose ends so he doesn't come undone.

 

xv.

“Sir,” Riza says, “Permission to speak openly?”

“Permission granted, Lieutenant,” Roy says, tiredly.

“Brigadier General Hughes enlisted to protect his family,” she says. She does not pull her punches, but she gives him a moment's notice to brace himself. “You owe it to him to continue doing so.”

Roy knocks back the whiskey and tries to drown the truth. But, like his nightmares, it swims.

 

viii.

The Elric brothers are the golden boys of the Jaeger program. They are young, handsome, congenial. Their sob story appeals to the public, both of them orphaned when a kaiju attack laid wreckage to the Australian coast line.

Their accents are as broad as their smiles and, all over the world, boys and girls alike collect posters and action figures of them.

Their Jaeger goes down somewhere close to Kyushu and, though official sources report them to be alive and stable, they do not appear in any morning shows for quite a while to come.

 

vii.

Riza outmatches him in the compatibility test. It's no surprise, really, but Roy cannot find it in himself to be disappointed. He's not sure he wants to let anyone into his head anyway.

It doesn't work with Jean or Heymans either. General Grumman pinches the tips of his mustache but does not concede defeat. He keeps sending other candidates at Roy, new recruits and seasoned pilots, but none of them are Maes, so it doesn't matter anyway.

 

iv.

Originally, they enlisted because it was the right thing to do and they took the test because they were curious. They hadn't known each other for long, barely enough to really call each other friends instead of comrades, so no one expected them to be drift compatible.

Their Jaeger is called Pyro Polaroid, a beautiful shiny thing, all gold and navy blue. Maes makes a fuzz after every battle, lamenting the scratches in the paint job as one would with a beloved old-timer.

Later, in his more macabre moments Roy thinks that maybe it was a good thing that Maes died because at least this way he didn't have to witness how Roy quite literally single-mindedly dragged Pyro Polaroid back to the shore and let her collapse against the cliffs. He didn't have to see her be decommissioned and ransacked for spare parts. He didn't have to watch Roy break just as efficiently.

 

ix.

The rumor reaches Roy when its subjects are already there. Then again, it's kind of hard to miss a giant Jaeger being flown into the base.

Roy doesn't have to guess who it is. The flaming red paint and black markings are enough of a giveaway.

Fullmetal Alchemist, despite the extensive damage she must have sustained, was a younger model and had thus been deemed worthy of repair. Similar things can be said for her pilots.

Alphonse Elric is being carted around the uneven floors of the base in a wheelchair, but his handshake is strong and his smile genuine.

“Looking forward to working with you,” he tells Roy as though it weren't unlikely that he'd ever walk again.

“Where on earth has Ed gone?” a young woman behind Al huffs. She has her hands on her hips and grease smears all over. She must be one of Fullmetal Alchemist's engineers.

“Probably making sure his baby is parked correctly,” Al replies, rolling his eyes. To Roy he says, “He's very particular about who gets to touch her.”

Who's going to co-pilot her then, Roy wants to ask but doesn't because the answer sure as hell is not Alphonse.

 

xi.

Edward fights as though he were participating in an illegal street fight, not looking for a drift partner. He's got his opponents on their backs in a matter of seconds and impatiently taps his bo staff against the floor mats as he waits for his next challenger.

“Come _on_ ,” he drawls. His skin glistens with sweat underneath his black tank top but morphs into scar tissue on his right shoulder. Somewhere in the crowd someone mutters how the automail gives him an unfair advantage. But drift compatibility is not about brute strength. It's about chess.

“Was that really it?” Ed asks now. His face is turned toward Grumman but his eyes are on Riza and her neat clipboard. She hesitates.

“There is one,” she says and when her gaze cuts over to Roy, Ed follows.

 

xxv.

The sunrise is made of seven colors, dyeing the sea and the sky. But the sun, the sun itself is bold and golden and almost bright enough to hurt Roy's eyes.

He does not look away.

 

xix.

They lose Arctic Briggs in the waves and Greed is rendered useless when Lan Fan is injured.

Ling gets her out, barely, and she survives, barely. Her remaining hand is red with her own blood as she clutches at Doctor Rockbell's bony wrist.

“Automail,” she grits out through the pain, “I can still fight. Give me automail.”

It took three years to get used to automail, one if you were as determined as Edward, but everyone knows that they only have days.

And yet, amid all the chaos and the destruction, it's easy to read Lan Fan's stubborn spite as hope.

“All right,” Doctor Rockbell says and gives a tight nod.

“Set the clock to zero,” Grumman orders and the bleak metal walls of the Shatterdome reflect his words like a mockingbird's song.

 

xxi.

Ed kisses like their staff fight might make one expect him to. Looking for openings, for weak spots, just this side of dirty. Roy matches him, kiss for kiss, and this is like their fight, too, this feeling of being alive, of being equal, of being in the right place at the right time.

 

xii.

Izumi Curtis coughs red blood into white handkerchiefs and observes Roy with narrow eyes.

Like him, she had once managed to pilot a Jaeger on her own. Unlike him, she had ended up with physical ruin instead of mental one.

“I found the boys in the rubble, hidden under the corpse of their mother,” she tells Roy what he has already heard on various radio shows, “I saw them grow old enough to enlist and I saw them nearly die at Kyushu. At some point you have to learn how to prioritize the world before your own fear.”

“I'm not afraid,” he says.

“Not of the kaiju,” she agrees.

 

xiii.

Roy tells himself he is merely embarrassed when he goes down the rabbit hole. He blames it on being unfamiliar with Fullmetal Alchemist and with how long it's been that he's been inside of a Jaeger at all.

He manages to jerk himself free, vaguely aware of the frantic voices breaking through his headset, only Riza's calm and reasonable. He does not look to his left to see Edward's face. He does not want his pity or his scorn. He does not want to think about how that boy has been inside of his head.

“I'm done here,” Roy croaks and runs away once more.

 

ii.

Roy flirts with show hosts, takes selfies with fans and ruffles little children's hair. He gives autographs and press conferences, wears tailored suits and debonair smiles. He's the bachelor, the playboy, the unattainable dream. Maes is the opposite, the family man, the goofball, the nerd, who makes dad jokes and shows off pictures of his family and his stamp collection.

They work well together, maintaining the perfect equilibrium of what the public wants to see. Dashing heroes, guys next door.

Maes does not talk about how Gracia silently cries whenever she has to watch him leave. Roy does not admit that maybe sometimes he drinks a little too much whiskey to forget the last trampled city and the corpses that came with it.

Instead, they are invited to dinner parties at the White House and appear on a sports car commercial. They are living the life, only that there is a lot of death involved, too.

 

xxii.

“We will pilot Greed,” Izumi announces. Sig is a mountain beside her, steady and silent.

“What?” Alphonse bursts out, “But you can't! Pinako said if you ever step foot into a Jaeger again, it's gonna kill you.”

Izumi smiles, fondly.

“Look around, kid,” she says, indicating the listless disarray of the Shatterdome, “If I don't do this, we are all going to die anyway.”

She looks over to Ed, catches his eye. His teeth are clenched and his arms crossed, but he holds her gaze. Then he gives a nod.

“Brother!” Alphonse protests. He looks very pale in the lights of his lab and it makes the red veins in his eyes even more glaring, “You can't-”

He breaks off, doesn't finish. It's the moment in which he realizes that he is not only going to lose his mentor but his brother, too.

“Oh,” he says, his voice tight with tears. But he must know that, one way or another, this was always going to happen.

 

x.

“Don't,” Doctor Rockbell says evenly, never even looking up from her newspaper. Smoking is not allowed in the base but no one seems to have told her that and so she is puffing away on her pipe.

Edward, who had been feeding Den scraps under the table, sends her a withering look.

“It's the end of the world,” he says, “The least we can do is die fat and happy.”

He says it easily, evasively. They all know it might be over soon. He says it as someone who knows better than others. Better than most.

“Why are you still fighting,” Roy asks, not sure if he even wants to know the answer, “If you think it's the end?”

Ed's eyes, even in the harsh fluorescent lights of the base, are as golden as few living things should be.

“Because if I don't,” Ed tells him, “It's gonna be game over either way.”

 

xvi.

Drift compatibility, generally speaking, makes sense.

Olivier Armstong and Artyom Buccaneer make sense because he has been serving under her for years. Ling and Lan Fan make sense because they grew up together. Sig and Izumi Curtis make sense because they are married and still madly in love.

Roy and Ed, on the other hand, should not make sense.

Ed's mind is a flurry of contradictions. Smiles tucked into the corners of his loved ones, Alphonse, their mother, Winry, Pinako. Izumi with a halo of the morning sun, a dead kaiju at her feet and a defunct Jaeger at her back, Izumi pale and with coughs shaking her asunder. Snippets of Al's mind interwoven with his own. Brandings of the precise moment in which Al lost feeling in his legs, of when Ed felt nothing but the absence of his own limbs. Metal grinding against kaiju scales, metal grinding into Ed's flesh and bone, fusing with his skin. Weeks and weeks of sitting by Al's bedside, waiting for him to wake up. Months and months of being useless, useless, useless. Day after day of dreadful news, broken walls, broken bodies.

And watching, always watching, as Winry and the rest of the team sew Fullmetal Alchemist back into her former glory, some uneven stitches here, some scars there, and Ed knows that you are never just piloting with your partner but with your Jaeger as well. He'll brave the oceans with her yet again and even the idea of doing it without Al doesn't hurt as much as it ought to.

Revenge, Roy had thought, when it had always been so much more than that.

 

xx.

“Oi,” Ed says, flicking an automail finger against Roy's wrist. The impact reverberates through Roy's bone marrow. “I'm not fucking piloting with you if you're hungover.”

“We share our minds, not our actual brains,” Roy tells him from experience. Maes had never complained about sympathy headaches the morning after Roy had drunk himself into a stupor again. But he had given Roy steady looks, not necessarily disappointed, but lingering a little too long for comfort. Ed is doing the same now, though his eyebrows are pinched, his eyes somber.

“What would you like me to do instead?” Roy says, offering a skeleton of a smile. He and Olivier had never gotten along but she had been Alex's sister and Roy blames himself for his failure. Without her and Buccaneer piloting Arctic Briggs, humanity is one, two, a dozen steps closer to extinction.

“Dunno,” Ed says. He scuffs the heel of his boot against the floor, shivering slightly. He's wearing an oversized sweater to fend of the perpetual cold of the Shatterdome. Does he miss the Australian heat? Does he miss his arm and leg underneath the phantom pain? Does he miss his mother like Roy misses Maes?

“Dunno,” Ed repeats, “But grief's gonna fuck you over if you don't fuck it back.”

“And how do you...,” Roy says, tilting his head to the side in mildly drunk curiosity, “Fuck grief back?”

Edward grins, boyish and brave and full of bad ideas.

“You fight,” he says as though it were a gospel.

A moment of enlightenment and then Roy sets his glass aside. He prays.

 

xvi.

Roy, to his chagrin, underestimated the Elrics. Not just Edward, but Alphonse, too.

There is more to them than sun tanned skin and the lucky coincidence of being drift compatible.

“I had to do something,” Alphonse says with red bleeding into his hazel eyes.

Roy wrinkles his nose against the invasive smell of the kaiju brain on the slab, but Edward doesn't even seem to notice, fussing over his younger brother like a nervous bird.

“What did you see?” Grumman wants to know.

“Their world,” Alphonse says and then he explains.

 

xxiii.

Sex, in its many forms, is a form of survival. On the one hand, there is procreation. On the other, there is the instinct to affirm life, the urgency of one's last moments.

Cheap whiskey, Roy knows, does not compare to orgasm, but Edward's eyes have the same color.

The boy has not done this often, Roy thinks. Too earnest to bed one of his many groupies, too busy to bother with anyone else. On the surface, Edward seems to consist of little but Jaeger, kaiju, and his pickpocketed family. Underneath that, however, sits a deep-rooted fear of pain and loneliness and abandonment.

So he lets Roy fuck him in the face of death and destruction, and Roy fucks him in spite of it. He puts no promises into his kisses, no reassurances, because he doesn't have any. Instead, he weaves solace into Edward's hair, gentle reminders that for now – for _now_ – they are here and alive and in each others' arms instead of each others' heads. It's little and lacking, but it's all they have and that makes it precious.

Roy does not dream that night.

 

iii.

“Ah,” Maes says, when they are playing cards without any gambles, “What will you do? When it's done, I mean.”

He never seems to doubt that it would be done, eventually. That humanity would win the fight and that life would return to how it was before the first kaiju appeared.

Roy thinks of how Maes himself would probably leave the military and take up a desk job somewhere else, something that allows him to be with Gracia and Elysia, something that doesn't count down his days like the war clock at the Shatterdome. Tick tick. Reset. Tick tick. Reset.

Roy, however, is not like that. Roy sees the horizon only when there is a new monster appearing on it. Roy never plans beyond that.

“I'd like to watch the sunrise,” he says and reveals his hand.

 

xxvi.

Mankind, like cockroaches, are tenacious little beasts.

 

xxiv.

“You mad cunt,” Edward yells against the wind. His hair is already wavy with sea salt, even though it can't have been more than a few minutes. Logically, Roy knows it can't have been more than a few minutes, even though it felt like eternity.

The memories of passing through the portal are both hazy and knife-sharp at the same time. He entered another world, another planet. And, what's more, he almost died. But he didn't.

“Are you all right?” he asks, somewhat numbly. There are voices coming from out of the escape pod, questions on whether everything worked out on their end, promises to come get them soon. He thinks he can hear helicopters in the distance.

“All right?” Edward repeats as though the definition of the word had just been fundamentally altered. The combination of his accent and adrenaline slur the words until he sounds almost drunk on elation. “ _All right?_ ”

His fingers are on the collar of Roy's suit, a tether that is tender and terrible at the same time. His clammy forehead presses against Roy's.

“This is General Grumman,” Grumman's voice drones out of the pod. He sounds tinny and far away. The moment remains untouchable.

“The breach is sealed,” he announces, “Stop the clock!”

Roy kisses Ed.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Like for Australian Edward and Alphonse drifting with kaiju!


End file.
